So, our family is aware of our feelings about the church. MIL couldn't believe DW's information about the things she was telling her. DW told her that it was on the church's website and MIL would not believe her. MIL call DW's brother and he tells her that apostates were posting that information on the church's website! He's supposed to be the church's PR rep for a largely LDS area and "in the know". Either he is lying or clueless.

Expletives seem appropriate at this time but would only reveal the new low to which I have sunk as I have fallen into Stan's grasp.

Oh well,

Dumbasses

Seriously?...and God hasn't called on his "prophet", or even his IT department, to remove this misinformation?

I know there was a Mormon Newsroom press release and the essays have been mentioned in many papers. Have they been mentioned in the Ensign? Have evil hackers hacked the newspapers too?!

The Priesthood Department sent a memo (Notice) to all church leaders to call their attention to the essays and the value they may have assisting members with questions.

Granted the essays are lame and created more questions than they are answering, but the authenticity is not in question.

See copy of the Notice here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lpig04xcmazhe5n/MemoFromChurchHQ.pdf?dl=0

Sometime, you just can't make this stuff up...

Classic stuff. The church really deserves these crazy people.

What on earth would it take for some people to stop making up crazy excuses to be able to deny the truth staring them in the face?

An angel with a drawn sword maybe? It seemed to work for Joseph Smith.

So the antis are posting it?

Yes, absolutely.

Because if that stuff were true, the church world be false.

Mmmmmkay.......

Well, when they find it's true, they can then move on to the next level, "It's not an important truth, like the truth that the church is true! The spirit tells me so!"

Always a next level that the church will head for. "The spirit tells me so!", as elderolddog mentions, and then there is You must have more faith as well as the admonition of Doubt your doubts. Also, mustn't forget Boyd Packer's stern directive that some truths are just not useful.

The twists and turns the cult takes IS what is believable about the cult. And, that's about it that is believable and what you will be given.

Ole Joey got it all started with his ability to twist the story from white beautiful sand in the bundle he was toting to Golden Plates! Right from the horses's, oh, I better say budding seer's mouth, quickly came the words as he loved to turn the situation into a game of his making. Let's see, here he said, or else sometime soon something to the effect, The damn fools believed me so I then and there decided to play along and see how long I could fool them.

It's humorous really.

The essays were an attempt at transparency.

Instead Mormons just call that anti mormon literature.

It finally happened. Mormons have become too much even for themselves. Mormons calling themselves anti mormons.

Maybe you could tell your relatives that if anti-Mormons had hacked into the church website, the language of the essays would be much more plain and matter-of-fact. There would be no sidestepping around the issues like you currently see in the essays. The age of fourteen would actually be called "fourteen" rather than "several months before her fifteenth birthday."

My guess is that the LDS church will not dispute this weird claim, but tacitly (mum's the word) support it.

That explains it. The best anti-Mormon informatoin comes from Mormons themselves.

I remember doing a genealogy search for Joseph Smith and finding all the names of his various wives, dates of marriage, and names of men they were married to when they married Smith.

It was all from a Mormon genealogy search web site.

T-Bone

Classic example of cognitive dissonance.

1. I am exposed to information that contradicts my paradigm.
2a. I can accept the new information and change my paradigm (high cost), or
2b. I can double-down on my paradigm by finding a seemingly plausible (though irrational) reason to reject the new information (low cost).

"MIL call DW's brother and he tells her that apostates were posting that information on the church's website! He's supposed to be the church's PR rep for a largely LDS area and "in the know".

Strange---articles about the church's on polygamy, race and the priesthood, etc., have been published in media around the world; but I haven't heard a peep from the church's PR department saying that those essays are the product of evil anti-Mormon hackers.

"Either he is lying or clueless."

I'd go with clueless. We regularly hear similar stories about the essays from other TBMs. It's hard to blame the TBMs, though, since the essays contain so much info that contradicts what we were all taught as Mormons. What the church is doing---as Grant Palmer has pointed out---is to begin telling the truth about church history, albeit as quietly as possible. The church's PR guys know that older members will be disturbed by the info, and that there's little the church can do about that. The church's goal is to inoculate younger members by revealing the info, so that more of the younger ones will stay active.

Since mopologists claim the church has no secrets, and that all this stuff has always been out there, your MIL should have said, "Yes, I already know all this, and it's no big deal."

I considered buying her a copy of Rough Stone Rolling and having it shipped to her house from Deseret Book. I'd be interested to see how that is explained.

I once sent a copy of the formerly-banned "In Sacred Loneliness" to an LDS acquaintance. I absorbed the added cost (vs. Amazon) of Deseret Book so that she received the book from an "official" source.

I was thinking about the statement and wonder if some of the quoted sources were from people who were no longer members of the church for example; D. Michael Quinn?

Yet another example of how TBMs use the phrase "anti-Mormon" to identify anything they don't agree with.

That makes me wonder... If members of the church deny the information in these essays, does that mean they're anti-Mormon? Maybe they could break off and become the Anti-Mormon-Mormons, or something like that. Seemed to work well enough in the BoM.

Reminds me of a pre-internet time when I showed a TBM a
facsimile edition of the "Book of Commandments" printed by
Deseret Book. Comparing the original version of God's actual
words to later versions after J.S. made a lot of changes can be
an eye-opener.

Even thought it was published by Deseret Book and had the
signature of the head of Deseret Book in the introduction (His
name was Thomas S. Monson, by the way and he was an apostle at
the time) a TBM I showed it to said it was fake. She assumed it
was a fake version that was published by anti-Mormons.

When you really wanna believe, there are always ways to do it.

You: That's right ma, the essays are a vast apostate conspiracy.

MIL: I knew it!

This is the precise reason Mormons are so gullible and victims of affinity fraud. They have been trained to ignore any and all evidence that conflicts with what they have been told to believe, no matter how obvious the conflict with reality.

It's amazing some of these people can function in the real world.

Reminds me of a MAD Magazine spoof.

TBMs usually don't want to get to the inside [of a truth or subject].

Share this with them and ask BIL PR guy to check with the official church PR guys/gals:

http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/church-provides-context-gospel-topics-pages

He could be lying AND clueless.